Invasion at Bald Eagle

by Kris Ashton

  “Well, some of the rumors were true,” Brolin said, referring to the civil war musket sitting on a set of hooks just above the mantle.

  “Let’s fan out and search the place. Barkley, you take the upstairs area. Brolin, you check the yard. I’ll do downstairs. Don’t dismiss anything, even if it looks like a groundhog burrow. If Coultier did have a stash of illegal weapons, there’s no telling what lengths he might have gone to hide it.”

  The others went off and Bert’s first stop was the fireplace. He set aside the fire screen and got down on one knee so he could look up the chimney. For centuries the human race had been hiding things in disused chimneys—everything from valuables to dead bodies. But judging by the fresh ashes that padded the blackened hearth, Bert did not expect to make a find—and indeed when he twisted his head to the side he saw a perfect rectangle of daylight.

  Over the next ten minutes he made a systematic search of the house’s lower level, checking any space that could feasibly conceal a cache of weapons, but came up with nothing. When he found himself returning to the fireplace, operating on dead hope, he sighed and shook his head. A second later he heard Barkley coming down the stairs.

  “Anything?”

  “Nothing,” Barkley said.

  Bert stepped towards him. “Did you check the att…” He trailed off.

  “Yes, I even got up into the roof space and did battle with the spiders, but there was only a lot of old…what are you looking at?”

  Bert’s feet were on the rug, just to one side of the coffee table that stood in the center of it. He pressed the toe of his shoe on the rug, as if testing the firmness of the pile. The floorboards beneath creaked.

  “If you’re trying to do the Twist, you need to use your arms a bit more,” Barkley said.

  Bert moved the coffee table out of the way and then lifted one corner of the rug. “Help me fold it back,” he said.

  They walked the rug across until it folded in half. Bert saw what he was looking for. He dug the pull-ring out of its recess in the floorboards and yanked it up.

  “The old cellar door in the floor trick,” Barkley said in an awful Agent 86 impersonation.

  Stairs led down into the cellar, and as Bert got near the bottom he fumbled around and found a light switch. A bare bulb illuminated the cellar and Bert had to duck his head to keep from knocking it on a row of joists. The cellar also appeared to be jerry-built, probably by Jim Coultier’s own unqualified hands, and Bert decided to make it a quick visit in case he wound up buried under half a ton of collapsed building materials.

  He did not need to search hard—the guns rested on lines of homemade racks. In front of each weapon was a metal box. Bert opened one of these (it had a latch, like a toolbox, but was not locked) and found a glut of ammunition, some of it already packed into clips. Bert didn’t know a great deal about automatic weapons, but he figured there had to be five or ten thousand dollars worth of hardware at his fingertips. He wondered whether Coultier had ever fired a single one, or if he simply sat in the cellar’s ropey light and cleaned his guns, gloating over them.

  “Did you find anything?” Barkley called down.

  “There’s a gun or two here. You’d better go and get Brolin.”

  Bert heard Barkley’s feet creak away over the living room floor. He picked up one of the guns, careful to keep it pointed away from his face. He walked halfway up the cellar stairs to see it in proper daylight and recognized it as an M-1, the machine gun of choice for America’s anti-communist forces in North Vietnam. He laid it at the top of the stairs and went back down to collect a second. This one had a similar shape to the M-1 but an altogether different design and feel in his hands—probably imported from England or some other foreign country. He placed it beside the first one and went subterranean again.

  Two sets of footsteps thudded above his head and stopped. “Jesus H Christ,” Brolin said. “What was this guy planning to do, invade Russia?”

  “Just a collector, I think,” Bert said, ascending the stairs with an Uzi in each hand. “Some people collect rare stamps, Jim Coultier collected military-grade weapons. Look at the muzzles—they’re pristine. I doubt they’ve been fired a single time. Now, one of you come halfway down and I’ll pass the rest up.”

  They formed a conveyance of hands and began running Jim Coultier’s arsenal up to ground level. The ammunition boxes were anti-matter heavy and Bert called Brolin down to assist rather than risk a slipped disc.

  When they had transported the final ammo box upstairs they took stock of their armory. Fifteen guns in total—five machine, five submachine, three hand and two rifles—each with its own plentiful supply of clips and bullets. Bert felt like they had won the lottery. He picked up one of the submachine guns and took an ammo clip from the corresponding box. He studied both items for a second and then slid the clip into the housing and slapped it home.

  “Okay, let’s get this stuff out to the car,” he said. “Father Bronson is probably—”

  “Shit!” Barkley said, pointing over Bert’s shoulder. “Shit!”

  Bert whirled around to see a creature framed in the shattered window, its dark eggshell eyes drinking them in. Bert raised the Uzi and squeezed the trigger.

  The gun lay dormant in his hand.

  Another creature joined its mate on the porch. It too stared at them through the gauzy shroud of the remaining curtain. Bert fired a second time.

  No response. The Uzi might as well have been a hammer.

  “Shoot them!” Barkley screamed. “What are you doing? Shoot them!”

  The safety.

  Before Bert could disengage the safety, the creatures crashed into the room amid a hailstorm of glass and wall plaster. One of the creatures lashed out at him with its arm spur. He executed a commando roll—his first in thirty years. Somehow he avoided breaking his neck and came up in a crouch, the Uzi pointed at the alien like a huge black finger. He flicked off the safety and opened fire.

  The gun jittered wildly in his grip and sprayed a volley of five bullets. One bullet ricocheted off the mantlepiece and put a splintered hole in the floor, but the other four found their target. At such close range the creature’s steely skin cracked open like a crab shell and some of its foul clotted-cream blood squeezed out onto the floor. It uttered its un-sound cry and stuttered back two steps, clawing and pawing at the wound. Bert stood and took proper aim this time, directing the Uzi’s sight just below the small white spot of the wound, and unleashed another blast.

  The creature’s entire chest split apart like a doctor’s bag and the squeeze of clotted cream became a splurge, its guts tumbling out onto the floor with a horrid splat. The combination of sight, sound and smell proved too much and Bert bent over at the hips, vomiting up some yellowish-white foam.

  He saw Barkley backed into the corner formed between the wall and the mantelpiece. In front of him, Brolin brandished a fire iron at the remaining creature, which could not decide whether to attack him or come to its friend’s assistance. Brolin decided for them both, wielding the poker in an orbital arc that made Bert think of the over-enthusiastic swings you often saw in little league baseball. The creature had about half an hour to telegraph the move and held up an arm in defense. Nonetheless, the poker connected with wicked force and bent the creature’s spur back flat against its arm. The impact also jarred the poker from Brolin’s grip. It rattled to the floor, just to the right of both him and the creature.

  “Get a gun, Barkley!” Bert hollered. “Don’t just stand there! Get a gun!”

  Barkley looked toward the sound of Bert’s voice but appeared to be welded in place. The creature also glanced around, perhaps torn between the easy kill and a self-preservation instinct. Bert had the Uzi trained on its ridged cockroach midsection but did not dare shoot with Barkley and Brolin in the line of fire.

  Brolin (showing quicker wits than Bert would ever have credited him with) saw the creature’s distraction and snatched back the poker. When spotted, the creature emitted a fr
eakish mew that fluttered their eardrums like butterfly wings.

  “Get ready, Barkley,” Brolin said and Bert was more than a touch unsettled to see the creature turn its head in Barkley’s direction.

  Brolin feigned another swing at the creature’s head but at the final second dropped the poker’s arc and belted it into the creature’s leg.

  The creature let out a high whistling sound and stumbled to one side. Brolin wound up again and let fly with a swing that would have knocked a baseball out of any park in the country. The creature thrust out its hand and stopped the motion dead, the clash of steel-on-steel reminding Bert of a blacksmith pounding an anvil. Brolin yelped and fell back, nursing his arms.

  The creature tossed the poker aside and lashed out at Brolin. The backhand strike should have sliced Brolin’s head off, but the creature had used the arm with the flattened spur. Nevertheless, the blow caught Brolin under the ear and lifted him off his feet, propelling him across the room. He smacked into the wall and dropped to the floor like a pile of dirty clothes.

  To Bert’s relief, Barkley broke his paralysis and nipped out of the corner while the creature’s back was turned. He leaped over the felled creature and knelt at Bert’s side like some sort of concubine.

  “Load more guns,” Bert said. He felt overcome with a weird calmness, perhaps a coping mechanism triggered by prolonged strain. He heard more inhuman feet strike the porch planks and something smashed in through an upstairs window. Bert’s mind cataloged these things as a general might chart an enemy’s movements.

  “Load more guns,” he told Barkley again, and then opened fire.

  The Uzi wriggled in his hands and pocks appeared in the creature’s armor. It stuttered back on its spindly legs, falling against the mantelpiece. Bert pressed forward, keeping his finger on the trigger. A ricocheting bullet knocked the Civil War musket off its hooks and it fell butt first onto the creature’s head. At the same instant two puncture wounds appeared in its chest, as if a giant spider had bitten into it, and its vile innards oozed out like toothpaste.

  Bert spun on his heel and saw another creature’s spur slicing through the air towards his face. He ducked his head, the briefest and most unthinking of reflex actions, and felt the creature’s blade skim off the top of his scalp, taking some hair and skin with it. Bert fired at the creature’s knobbly knee joint. Friction sparks shot out as the stream of bullets bounced off it and flew in random directions. When a rebounding bullet pierced a hole in Bert’s pants leg he tipped the gun up and directed it at the creature’s face. One of its eyes vanished in a welter of glassy shards and it staggered backward, collapsing on top of a second creature stepping in through the window.

  Bert brought his gun to bear on them both, an intoxicating sense of vengeance stealing all but his shallowest breaths.

  The gun began to click impotently and discharged nothing. The second creature threw off its injured companion and stood to its full height. Bert pegged his Uzi at it but the creature batted it away like a fly. Before he could think, the creature sprang at Bert with a panther’s swiftness, its arm spur swiping for his neck. Out of alternatives, Bert stepped into its attack and put up his arm to block the blow.

  He heard the crack first; it sounded like someone biting down on a hard pretzel. The pain came a second later, determined to atone for the delay. It felt as though someone had cut open Bert’s forearm and dropped a ball of scorpion stingers inside. He fell sidelong onto the floor, and as he went down he saw his arm had developed a second elbow—one that stretched the skin pale at its corner. His world faded the light grey of rainless clouds. His senses became muffled, as if packed in cotton wool.

  He came back to the stuttering roar of a machine gun. A gobbet of creature blood splatted against his check. He rolled on his side, certain he would puke again, but the movement jarred his arm and a supernova of shrieking agony engulfed his entire being, blacking him out.

  When Bert returned a second time, Barkley was shaking his shoulder and slapping him on the cheek. “Sheriff?” he enquired. “Are you all right?”

  “He’s back with us,” Brolin said. The hippie looked groggy himself and had a contusion above his left eyebrow.

  “I think there’s going to be more of them here soon,” Barkley said. “We need to get out of here. Do you think you can sit up?”

  Bert nodded, and with Barkley and Brolin’s aid achieved a sitting position. This simple movement, however, sent shock lines of pain through his arm and his brain tried to go overcast again. He shook his head to clear it and used his good arm to cradle his broken one. “Grab me under the armpits and lift me up,” he said. “Sorry about the sweat,” he added.

  “Compared to those things,” Brolin said, referring to the odoriferous corpses, “your armpits smell like Chanel No. 5.”

  Once they had him upright, they started to collect the guns. Bert tried to let go of his fractured arm but a small spark of the potential pain made it unthinkable. “You’re going to have to manage without me, boys,” he said. “That son of a bitch broke my arm good and proper.”

  Barkley grunted as he lifted a box of ammunition. “That looks painful, Sheriff,” he said, staring rudely at Bert’s wonky limb.

  “Feels wonderful,” Bert said, “better than a night with Raquel Welch. Or Robert Redford, I guess.”

  Barkley gave him a mortified glance and carried the box toward the front door. If Bert had been blessed with a third arm, he would have smacked himself upside the head.

  “What was that all about?” Brolin said.

  “Friend of Dorothy,” Bert said raising his eyebrows.

  “Ah. Plenty of them in San Francisco,” Brolin said, walking past Bert. “They’re just normal people like you and me, you know.”

  “Not quite.”

  Left alone with the stinking corpses and his thumping, stinging arm, Bert’s conscience, masquerading as his wife, turned on him. So what if he’s a homo? That homo saved your life, in case it slipped your memory in the past two minutes. You’re a dinosaur, Bert Grayson. You like to think you’re an enlightened liberal who votes Democrat and treats everyone equally, but if you scrape away that layer of paint you’re nothing but a suspicious, bigoted mountain man who’s afraid of anything that challenges the norm.

  “I’m doing the best I can, goddammit,” Bert muttered under his breath. His heart beat a bit faster and he could feel his pulse in his new elbow.

  Barkley came back in. “We’re not going to fit much of this gear into the trailer,” he said. “You’ll have to open the trunk.”

  Bert almost reached into his pocket but caught himself in time. He looked at Barkley and swallowed. “You’ll have to get the keys out of my pants.”

  “Perhaps you’d feel more comfortable if—”

  “Just get them out,” Bert growled, gritting his teeth against a hot flash of pain.

  Barkley looked warily at Bert’s pocket, as if suspecting it might be booby-trapped, and then put his hand inside. His nimble fingers kept to the outer side of Bert’s thigh, quickly hooked through the keyring and plucked the keys out. Upon the mission’s success their eyes held a swift debriefing. Then Barkley rushed away to pick up another ammo box. Subsequent to some small but intense contemplation, Bert followed him out to the cruiser, his ego assuring him that he only planned to keep watch for the creatures. He looked on as Barkley wedged the ammo box into the trailer, fastened the tarp and unlocked the boot.

  “I’m sorry if what I said was offensive.”

  “Don’t worry, Sheriff. I’ve dealt with—”

  “No, listen. People like Brolin were brought up to be open-minded, but it’s harder for my generation. I guess when you have it drilled into you from the cradle that queers are abominations, it’s a hard thing to let go of. So I’m always going to be a little disgusted by your choice of lifestyle, I suppose, but then I’m also disgusted by people who chew with their mouths open. It doesn’t mean I have to be an asshole about it. You saved my life and I want you to know
I’m grateful for that.”

  Barkley nodded and a furtive smile pressed his lips. “Well, I appreciate that.”

  Brolin came out lugging three guns, their barrels pointing past his face at wild angles. Barkley relieved him of one and they piled the guns up on the back seat. As they went in and out of the house Bert kept watch on the wooded hills that rose up on the other side of Main Street, but his unoccupied hands made him feel useless. He had always been a man loath to do nothing; even in the afternoon of his career an occasional languid lunch had been his only allowance to idleness. He smiled with a pensive fondness as he remembered how exasperated Dana could get with this stripe of his personality—at the pictures, on a picnic, during post-dinner conversation on Thanksgiving, he was apt to fidget and tap his foot and fiddle with a spoon. She had been a kind and wise soul and in some ways he felt glad the cancer had spared her this current ordeal.

  As Bert emerged from his reverie his heart froze. Barkley and Brolin stepped out with another M-1 apiece, chuckling about something.

  “Another half a dozen to go and we’re done, Sheriff,” Barkley said.

  “We don’t have time. We have to go. Now.”

  Both men stopped dead and turned to look towards the hillside, which rose up a quarter mile from the Coultier house. Silver forms—dozens, perhaps hundreds—were spreading through its mottled green. They appeared and disappeared with breaks in the forest canopy, like stars winking in and out behind high clouds.

  “Holy shit,” Brolin said.

  “Come on!” Bert said, almost hopping up and down at the passenger’s side door. “Brolin, you’re driving. Let’s move.”

  Barkley and Brolin tossed their armfuls of guns into the back seat. Brolin opened the door for Bert and helped him get in, and then he and Barkley scampered around the other side. Bert looked out the window as more and more creatures swarmed over the hillside, a cascade of live metal washing down through the trees. A brief but vivid childhood memory came to Bert, of poking an ants’ nest with a stick and watching on fascinated as the soldiers poured out in a black mass of shining bodies and twiddling legs to repel the attack.